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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   4230 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Federal District Court in Texas says the federal ban on home distilling is not a Constitutionally-permissible power of Congress.

This seems extremely plausible to me as a matter of Constitutional law. Assuming it survives appeals, is there any form of home distilling that is "worth it"?

If we see Gonzalez v. Raich or Wickard v. Filburn overturned, that would be cool. I don't especially expect it, because it would be far-reaching, but who knows. They made several important anti-agency decisions this term, so it might be possible.

I'm not a hard liquor guy, so I cannot tell you, but I dabble in homebrewing, and as far as I understand all you need for alcohol is water, sugar, and yeast. I don't know how things work in Americaland, but in Europe there's no way to make either of these components add up to what you have to pay, after excise taxes are applied. Governments trying to ban home distilling is a pretty good indication of it being cost-efficient enough to be competitive with the store bought stuff.

Distilling requires a still, of course, which is considerably more capital and energy than simply brewing, which can be done in a jug.

I remember on the old subreddit seeing a comment talking about Thomas Middleditch's open relationship. Rewatching Silicon Valley with the missus and wanted to show her. Anyone remember the thread I'm talking about?

LLM-generated images and videos are controversial, with some arguing they should be banned as they take work away from talented artists. But I've thought of one use case for them that I think even the most ardent opponent of them might begrudgingly concede is reasonable.

There's an early episode of Friends in which Joey secures a gig as a stock photo model, only to later discover to his horror that his photo is being used as part of a PSA to encourage people to get tested for STDs, and now no woman will go near him with a barge pole. It's common enough to have its own trope, and there have been some real life examples. I remember a few years ago in which a guy was hired to be a stock photo model, only to later find that his photo was being used in Reductress articles with titles like "Hero! This Man Watched Porn That Wasn’t About Flushing A Woman’s Head In A Toilet!" - he went on Twitter to assure people that he respects women and had no say in how his likeness was used. What got me thinking about it was that I saw an ad campaign the other day which advises people that the act of even threatening to share revenge porn is itself a criminal offense, with a still image of a man at home being visited by two police officers. I feel kind of bad for the guy in the ad - sure, he agreed to do it, but a nonzero amount of women in his future may well think he's some kind of creep.

So this strikes me as a use case for AI images almost everyone could get behind: if you need a still image to depict a fictional character who is extremely unsympathetic (particularly in PSAs, government ad campaigns and similar), and you're concerned that the actor you hire to portray that character will be mistaken for the real thing by some significant proportion of the public and face abuse, harassment and damage to their career as a result. What do you think? Particularly interested in hearing from people who are very opposed to most applications of AI-generated images.

I don't think this is a very strong argument. Playing Devil's Advocate for the other side (who I strongly disagree with in principle), they could argue that the ethics are more easily solved by having better informed consent for the models and actors. If they want to use your image for an unsympathetic role, they need to advertise the position that way so the models and actors can make an informed decision. The fact that this will result in social ramifications means that such positions will have to pay extra in order to make up for it, and people who feel like the tradeoff is worth it can earn extra money in exchange for sacrificing their reputation, just as a sewer works earns extra money to compensate for the fact that it stinks and is unpleasant. Supply and Demand will handle the details for you, as long as people are informed.

I personally don't think that people have a right to jobs that can be automated, that's just strictly inferior to welfare. But if you did believe that, then replacing these jobs is potentially more damaging than average because they are (or ought to be) higher paying jobs than average.

But they're only higher-paying than average because they have unusually high disutility. So in terms of net utility gain to the model, it shouldn't be any different.

I wonder if this became a well-known trend, would it bleed out to similar scenarios? For example, especially unsympathetic villains would be portrayed by AI instead of humans? Could it start a euphemism treadmill where humans are only associated with less- and less- offensive things, and AI is used for anything remotely negative?

There are some peer reviewed publications that poverty increases cortisol levels which stunts developing of brains which makes the poor do poorly on tests. I understand I probably would not get a good faith discussion with these people about this, but high cortisol also does stunt height, fat mass, muscle mass (often simply measured by grip strength). Why would we see only the brain stunted but none of the latter? What do the authors even think? p.s. I mean the poor in USA and other first world countries p.p.s ("opression by poverty")

If I had to guess I would say you are right that it stunts everything and that it does limit intelligence. Like ulyssessword said, funding probably limited how many studies have been done on this subject. Just hypothesizing, but maybe there are people that are more psychologically and physically resilient (genetically) so that they are not affected as much or at all by the stress of poverty, making the data messy. It could be there is no effect for certain people.

But I can't imagine why it wouldn't be true on average that, if you had twins where you had one live in poverty and had the other live a middle class life, the wealthier one should be bigger, stronger, and smarter. Unless they're both resilient, then I guess the outcomes could be the same.

But if you have many examples of such cases of twins and take an average, maybe you could see the overall effect poverty has, eliminating the effect of some pairs being resilient/robust to the effects of poverty. Not sure if this has been done, assessing IQ AND health markers of many pairs of twins living at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. It would be interesting to see if pairs with larger differences in IQ had larger differences in health markers as well.

...but none of the latter?

Are you sure about that? A study associating poverty, cortisol, and low muscle mass is boring, which sounds like a fatal flaw when searching for funding. Maybe we aren't seeing it because nobody has bothered to look.

Well I found at least one publication on fat&muscles vs cortisol, but it is from.... Poland: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34452601/

it's certainly more boring, but also much less politically sensitive.

It is also known that USA Black children have slightly stronger grip strength than USA Whites.

Please link the studies.

Don't we see that? Throughout history rich people tend to be taller, stronger and more attractive than comparably selected poor people.

comparing between-countries, yes, inside-country no.

I mean, the US poor are short and fat compared to the rich.

How much of that is because the poor have disproportionately included relatively more first gen immigrants from places with relative food scarcity and stunted growth? The tradition of second gen immigrants being a head taller than their parents in the US is a long running one.

The white and black poor are mildly taller than the Hispanic poor but even fatter, so I don’t think that’s what it is.

The latter are stunted compared to wealthier cohorts?

Wrong thread?

Per the description: "Culture war topics are accepted."

But there’s not a question here.

Good point.

Interviewing for a new job, in the final steps. The recruiter has stated that the team lead wants to chat before they extend an offer as a get-to-know-you type of thing.

They have provided the team lead's linked in profile, and they're very clearly a "gender-goblin": purple hair with side shave, dressed as if they're at a renn-faire, pronouns galore, lots of posts about promoting DEI and complaints about white men.

Being a straight-white-male, what's the best way to approach this interview and potentially disarm this person's anti-straight-white-male prejudices? Do I ask about the company's DEI efforts and policies (even though I don't give a shit)? Do I attempt to come off as gay as possible (not too hard, I have gay-ish hobbies and I can fake a lisp)?

I really want this job, it would result in a 40% salary bump and my current job is sliding into a shit show. It would really suck to have it tanked by some progressive golem at the last mile.

You do what you always do in interviews, come off as a more positive, secure and high energy version of yourself.

What these people want is affirmation, not for you to pretend to be gay. If asked you can play up whatever interest you think aligns with theirs but nothing more than that. Ask about them and what they believe and what their goal is, not the company's policies, you're past HR.

Go for it, just find the persxn's bluesky account and practice all of this week's shibboleths. Getting good at taqiyya is the most important job skill a white man can have, because God knows being good at the work doesn't help when 80% of applicants are pre-screened solely by DEI departments.

If it helps, you have my permission to call me your boyfriend from Canada/not from Canada. But camping up the gay is probably a bad idea now that white gays are mostly considered potential traitors and wreckers.

Hol' up, there's an actual Arabic word for "hiding your power level"?

Yes. Have you not heard of it before?

I mean I suppose I’m probably around more actual islamophobes than you, but I thought it was common knowledge that Muslims are theoretically allowed to lie about what they believe to infidels.

No, never. It's a fascinating concept. Especially when contrasted with the Christian lionization of saints who refused to even pretend to renounce their faiths and were put to death in consequence.

I've been meaning to explore it more and make a post about it.

In light of a Russian court ordering the arrest of Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, why did Navalny return to Russia from Germany in January 2021 after spending five months recovering from an assassination attempt? Has his death had any effect on Russian politics?

EDIT: grammar

Generally it's considered a brave/heroic act that was miscalculated. He bet on regime being close to collapse/reform(in which case he would much rather be prisoner in Russia than influencer in Germany) and lost. Effect was mostly negative for his supporters, the widespread demoralization and despair. He was a great man to whom no replacement has been found still.

My outsiders perspective is that he did it to keep an opposition spirit 'alive', even though he knew his personal efforts wouldn't likely be fruitful. I don't know if he expected death, but maybe was influenced by the experiences of late soviet dissidents and Warsaw pact detractors who were often imprisoned and harassed by authorities but lived to form the foundations of some post-communists governments.

No, it hasn't moved the needle. I think now that the Russian liberals are finally out of the state of shock from what happened, the majority position is that nobody has any idea why he did that. His reasoning was that he is a Russian politician, which means he can't be abroad. In hindsight, this was dumb because he already almost got killed once and nobody understands why risk it again on the enemy turf outside of some dubious martyr value.

It came out that there were negotiations to swap him for some Russian prisoners in Ukraine, but the details are really foggy. I guess this means that he regretted it after all?

As for non-liberals, i.e. everybody else, nobody gave a crap and still doesn't.

I went to see a local production of The Merry Wives of Windsor last week, twice. After the first time, I immediately knew I wanted to go back and watch it again, so my wife and I got tickets for another show and took my mother two days later! It was truly fantastic, a wonderful production, with actors who absolutely exuded charisma and interpretations of the setting that were beautiful and brilliant, life and joy affirming comedy. They did a mid-century modern setting: Falstaff was a down-on-his-luck fat-Elvis, his band were a bunch of greasers, Fenton was a jock, Slender a preppy doofus, Slender's uncle a southern sheriff. And it got me thinking:

Has every Shakespeare play more or less remained in production within a generation, such that we are watching an unbroken chain of transmission from producer-to-producer, or have some of them gone moribund and been revived from scratch?

Obviously, the producers and directors of this play had seen it before, if not in person in some filmed version. The stage directions, the character interpretations, the delivery of the lines, are partly derivative, surely, of other productions. When the Welsh preacher talks about pretty Anne Parson's "great gifts" and gestures to indicate breasts, or he and the uncle ask Slender whether he can please the girl and make lascivious motions to indicate sex, that is a particular interpretation of the language, not natural necessarily to the text, and I found myself wondering if that kind of thing is mostly passed down, or invented whole cloth at some later. Particularly for the canonical English writer in Shakespeare.

Are we watching a interpretation of the play that is based on productions earlier this century which have been recorded, which themselves were influenced by earlier productions, in a direct line more or less to the Globe? Or to when? Surely, even before recordings, most times some individual at the theatrical company would have seen an earlier production of Wives and been able to offer that experience as a basis for interpretation, and in that earlier production someone would have seen an even earlier production, how far back do we think that went? To Victorian times? To Shakespeare himself?

Since 1660, it was probably performed enough that most theater aficionados would have had occasion to see at least one Shakespeare play performed at least once in their lifetimes. Why 1660? Aside from the irregularity after his death, Cromwell's Puritan dictatorship (10-20 years or so of no theater) actually was pretty effective at shutting down plays until the monarchy's restoration, including Shakespeare. It's also worth nothing that for at least one time period afterward, Shakespearean plays were often performed having been in many cases rewritten or adapted to change some key aspects. For example, there was one era (see: Restoration Comedy) where many of them were given happy endings, which as you may imagine required extensive changes in some cases (like King Lear or Macbeth). Also, you mentioned some of the vulgar jokes the plays contained, this also waxed and waned according to the times. Immediately after the restoration, a lot of theater got very bawdy very quickly, and so afterward there was a bit of a push to field plays that were more socially beneficial or preaching good behavior, and that extended to Shakespearean performance as well (see: Sentimental Comedy). Furthermore there were a few eras where the tragedies were a little, uh, too heavy and others where the comedy wasn't "in style" - so sometimes this meant Shakespeare wasn't performed as often, and other times this meant they would significantly change the jokes. Even beyond this, you have to remember there was still some aspects of theater that, in a pan-European sense, developed differently. Shakespeare wasn't always super duper popular beyond England, though he did get some common play-time (forgive the pun). And within England, there was a long time where "official" plays were only legally allowed to be put on in two or three specific places. This necessarily cut down on the number of Shakespeare that would be even possible to stage, and certainly the less-popular Shakespeare might not show up at all. The typical count is what, like 30+ plays? Every play having been performed at least once within a 50-60 year span might have been possible, but I doubt it. Some of those "least popular" plays are like, actually pretty unpopular, and I imagine that the frequency diminishes pretty fast going backwards in time.

Source: currently taking a history of modern theater course (it's filling a GE requirement). If you have some specific questions I'd be happy to ask my professor for you! We haven't gotten quite that far yet, but I'd imagine the "unbroken chain" is a much more modern thing. Reconstruction of what the originals might have been like wasn't undertaken for at least a century, and was also informed by our historical understanding.

theater got very bawdy very quickly,

To illustrate the point: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Farce_of_Sodom,_or_The_Quintessence_of_Debauchery

Has every Shakespeare play more or less remained in production within a generation, such that we are watching an unbroken chain of transmission from producer-to-producer, or have some of them gone moribund and been revived from scratch?

Some have always been less popular or have had peaks and troughs of popularity, but it is interesting that he has pretty much been consistently popular since he wrote them. There was never really a major lull in production, certainly not between 1650 and today.

Did The Motte ever discuss the outcome of the NetChoice cases? Did I miss it? I don't like to admit this, but I will admit that I want to brag ever so slightly. There is a lot to interpret in the mix of opinions, but what I think was my core prediction was:

I cannot imagine five members of the Court will sign off on saying that the Constitution guarantees GMail the right to refuse private communications service based solely on their dislike of an individual's politics.

And I think that was vindicated. They rejected the facial challenge on the grounds that there are just too many different types of things being lumped into one bucket, all at once, with plenty of references to direct messaging as being of particular concern.

Moody v. Netchoice and Netchoice v. Paxton

9-0, as to judgment; 6 is the most any one opinion gathers, with Kagan writing, joined by Roberts, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, and in part, Jackson.

Alito writes for the other three. Thomas, Barrett, and Jackson all write additional opinions.

The case concerns two laws passed in 2021 regulating internet entities, one from Florida, and one from Texas. The laws restricted content moderation, and required explaining the reasoning behind content moderation restricting users. Netchoice is suing that these violate the first amendment. Netchoice is a trade association containing a whole host of large social media companies—Google, Etsy, Twitter X, and a whole host more—that exists, it seems, largely to lobby or combat laws like the two passed.

In both cases, Netchoice sought preliminary injunctions, and in both cases they were granted by the district court. The Eleventh Circuit held that the platforms' decisions were constitutionally protected speech, and accordingly found that the moderation and disclosure requirements were unconstitutional (the latter because it is too burdensome), with the sole exception of the requirement in Florida's laws that the platform disclose the content moderation policy in general (as opposed to in specific cases). The Fifth Circuit held that NetChoice did not try to show it unconstitutional in all applications, held that the restrictions on moderation were not regulating the Platforms' speech, and upheld the disclosure requirements, both general and particular, due to Zauderer having ruled that it was permissible to compel factual information.

The Supreme Court here unanimously agrees that the cases need to be remanded, as courts did not adequately consider that these were facial challenges—that is, that they must consider the law in general, rather than as applied to the plaintiffs. The laws are broad, and they were only addressed narrowly.

I'll start with the smaller opinions this time.

Barrett concurs. She briefly notes at the outset that she agrees with the court that the Eleventh Circuit (which struck down the Florida law) correctly stated 1st amendment precedent, whereas the Fifth circuit (which upheld the Texas law) did not. The remainder of her concurrences emphasizes that this indicates the difficulties of bringing a facial rather than an as-applied challenge. She notes the various difficulties in evaluating these, even were it only as-applied: the first amendment only protects expressive activity. Are decisions made by AI expressive? Further, what if the corporation is located overseas, and so not entitled to First Amendment rights? Considerations like these would more fittingly be applied in specific cases, instead of attempting to evaluate it all in a single facial challenge. So she would prefer they bring it as-applied.

Jackson concurs in part. She thinks that it is generally clear that some things a social media company may do are protected by the first amendment, and others are not, but it is hard to say more here. She agrees with Barrett that the Eleventh Circuit "at least fairly stated" the First Amendment precedent, whereas the Fifth Circuit did not. But, like the whole court, she agrees that they need to reevaluate it in light of it being a facial challenge. Jackson states that the question, in evaluation of this, is not whether corporations as a class, or a particular corporation, is acting constitutionally, nor even whether, e.g. content moderation fits precedent, but it depends on the way that the activities actually function regarding whether they constitute expression. Jackson would decline to look at the ruling on the merits as-applied to the companies, and hence she only joins three parts of the majority opinion: I (the history of the cases), II (the analysis of it being facial, and so requiring remand), and III-A (the account of the first amendment precedent). It seems she does not join Kagan's application of that precedent to these cases.

Thomas concurs in the judgment. He disagrees with the court's decision to give opinions on the applications of those statutes, as this involves some of the same sorts of analysis that they complained about—looking at specific cases, instead of the broad range. He agrees with Alito's analysis. Thomas first notes two additional considerations: the Courts depend on Zauderer, which stated that "laws requiring the disclosure of factual information in commercial advertising may satisfy the First Amendment if the disclosures are reasonably related to the Government's interest in preventing consumer deception." In classic Thomas fashion, he thinks that should be reconsidered, citing an opinion from himself fourteen years prior. Secondly, he notes that he thinks the lower courts should continue to be guided by the common carrier doctrine, which have certain requirements, especially, service of all comers, and that there is historical precedent for regulating transportation and communications networks like traditional common carriers. (Again, citing his past opinions.) The lower courts addressed this in their analysis previously; they should continue to do so, though that cannot really be feasibly be done under a facial analysis.

With that prelude aside, Thomas turns to the main portion of his concurrence, where he argues that facial challenges violate the command of article III. Article III gives courts the power only over "cases" and "controversies." In such particular cases and controversies, it is the place of the courts to say what the law is, but only in those cases. This is necessary to confine the courts to a judicial role. Facial challenges conflict with this because they ask whether statutes constitutionally conflict in cases not before the court. Facial challenges require that no set of circumstances exist under which it would be valid, or in the case of the First amendment, the looser standard that it has prohibits too high of a ratio of protected:plainly unprotected speech. Facial challenges thus ask courts to issue decisions that are unnecessary to decide some particular case or controversy. Plaintiffs are required to show that they personally have suffered an actual or threatened injury, and must be given a remedy that is limited to the injury. Accordingly, the case is done once they have decided whether it is legitimate as-applied. Deciding whether it would be legitimate as applied to other plaintiffs is not necessary, and should be considered as no more than an advisory opinion, which should not be issued. Facial challenges allow challenging applications of statutes that have not injured him, which is ordinarily disallowed. They also allow enjoining of applications of statutes which have nothing to do with his injury, which is not how redressability is supposed to work, and like a universal injunction, which is itself problematic (citing himself and Gorsuch). Facial challenges further intrude upon powers reserved to the Legislative, the Executive, and the States. They allow for the review of constitutionality of applications of a statute before even it has been enforced, giving courts "a general veto power" upon the legislation of Congress, but the Judiciary has no constitutional role in lawmaking. As-applied challenges minimize intrusion. This leaves the Executive branch free to enforce it in other applications. Facial challenges, on the other hand are maximalist, leaving the other branches with no opportunity to correct things, harming the democratic nature of the government. Moreover, facial challenges can prevent the application of state laws in its particular cases, and usurp power from state courts, contrary to the 10th amendment.

Facial challenges also create practical problems. They harm the adversarial system, by allowing plaintiffs to present a challenge without direct knowledge of how the case might apply to others, and so often depend on speculation.

As applied to these cases, the state officials had no opportunity to tailor the enforcement of the laws, nor state legislatures to amend the statutes prior to their enjoinment, nor state courts to interpret the law. Rather federal courts, with little factual record, did. Thomas notes that some blame here is because of associational standing (e.g. NetChoice, instead of the constituent entities) mucking things up—he opposed associational standing in his concurrence over mifeprestone earlier this year—but the facial nature also plays a role in that. The task before them is impossibly complex.

They are also suspect in their origins, being a result of vagueness and overbreadth. At the time of the founding, the courts correctly understood themselves to only decide particular cases or controversies. The founders four times rejected creating a council of revision, which would evaluate and reject statutes, untied from a case. The narrow understanding of what the court could do was generally adhered to for over a century. The first change to this was the development of vagueness—courts began in 1914 to strike down statutes as unconstitutionally indefinite. In 1940, in the First Amendment context, they struck down a statute as "invalid on its face," as it was a "sweeping proscription of freedom of discussion." The court has never justified this overbreadth doctrine in text and history, "just policy considerations and value judgments." This eventually spread elsewhere, without textual or historical justification. Thomas concludes that the court should put an end to facial challenges.

Enough of the minor opinions, now to the two major ones.

Kagan writes for the majority. After introducing and giving the history of the cases (recall: 5th circuit upheld the law, the 11th circuit struck it down), she addresses the facial nature of the case. The court has made facial cases hard to win, ordinarily requiring showing that they are invalid in every application. It is still difficult even in First Amendment cases, like the present one, where the challenger must show that "a substantial number of the law's applications are unconstitutional, judged in relation to the statute's plainly legitimate sweep." But both parties thus far have only been considering them in more narrow applications (like Facebook's news feed), instead of the full range of applications (Among others, is direct messaging covered? Gmail filters? Etsy reviews?). And then it must be considered whether those applications violate the First Amendment: in the case of the content-moderation provisions, whether it intrudes on protected editorial discretion. Regarding individualized-explanation provisions, whether the disclosures unduly burden expression. These issues have not been considered, so they vacate and remand.

Then: "It is necessary to say more about how the First Amendment relates to the laws' content-moderation provisions, to ensure that the facial analysis proceeds on the right path in the courts below," and this is especially needed for the Fifth Circuit, as otherwise, it would just decide the same way, as it wrongly held that they were not speech at all, and wrongly treated Texas' interest as valid.

In essence, Texas' law requires carrying or promotion of speech, when the platforms would rather do the opposite. The platforms argue that this requires changing their expression, and the Court has held in the past that expression includes curation of speech by others. The precedents: In Tornillo, the Court held a law requiring newspapers give candidates the right to reply to criticism violated the First Amendment, in forcing them to print what they would otherwise not. In Pacific Gas & Elec. Co., a utility company distributed views on energy policy in its billing envelopes, the state required including inclusion of material from a different perspective, and the Court sided with the company, as it was not required to carry speech it disagreed with. In Turner I, they held that rules requiring cable operators to allocate channels to local broadcast stations involved the First Amendment. (Even though they eventually decided it was worth restricting anyway in Turner II.) In Hurley, they decided that a parade was free to decide who to admit. On the other hand, they allowed compelled access in two cases: in Pruneyard, they permitted a law compelling a mall to allow people to distribute pamphlets. And in FAIR, they permitted which compelled law schools to allow the military to recruit on campus. In both of these, it was understood that these did not affect expression of the party.

From that can be drawn three principles: The first amendment protects those who compile speech when they wish to exclude some. Secondly, this includes when they exclude just a few items. Third, the government cannot merely assert an interest in balancing the marketplace of ideas.

Things like Facebook's News Feed involve removing or prioritizing content. This is like the cases before, and so is protected. Texas's law thus is problematic. This does not change by the fact that they allow most speech through. Nor does the fact that users can easily tell that it is the users speaking, not the platform, change anything.

Texas' stated interest does not work—promoting ideological balance among private actors is not a legitimate government interest, as it is inherently censorious.

The remaining major opinion is that of Alito:

Alito opens, in the very first paragraph of his introduction, by stating that everything except the facial unconstitutionality of the case is nonbinding dicta. That is, most of Kagan's opinion is extraneous to the matter decided then, can be dismissed, and is of no precedential value. He agrees that it needs further examination as to whether it is facially unconstitutional. But they should not have gone further.

Alito proceeds to a lengthier discussion of the state laws and history of the two cases before they came to the Supreme Court. Then he turns to the facial nature of the challenge: these are strongly disfavored, and conflict with several principles—they clash with the general principle of not reaching beyond what is needed in court decisions, are antidemocratic, and "strain the limits" of the constitutional authority to decide "cases" and "controversies." Accordingly, the requirements are demanding—generally speaking, it fails wherever there is any "plainly legitimate sweep" to the statute. Netchoice asks that this standard not be applied. This is wrong, as the states have asked for the rules of a facial challenge to be applied, and even were it not the case, they would still be necessary for the courts to follow. Netchoice chose to make a facial challenge; now it must deal with the consequences of that choice.

Alito then turns to whether NetChoice manage to show that it is facially constitutional. He begins by reviewing. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, which usually involves government efforts to forbid, restrict, or compel expression. But some cases have included presenting an edited compilation for the purpose of expressing a message. But not every compilation is expressive. Accordingly, the First Amendment only protects expressive compilations. To show that a compilation is expressive, they must first show that they exercise editorial discretion, and are not, for example, "dumb pipes" that return whatever is put in. This may vary within the same entity, even—newspapers often will exercise far less discretion in advertisements, which may make a meaningful first amendment difference, or a parade might ordinarily only select groups, and not individuals. (Contra the majority, it can matter how much they include vs. exclude, depending on their methodology.)

Additionally, the compilation must be expressing some (often abstract) point. Chronological organization, for example, isn't really expression. It was for this reason that in PruneYard they were willing to compel a mall to host third-party speech.

Third, they must show that their speech is affected by the speech it would be compelled to accommodate. In PruneYard and FAIR they held that the government could compel speech, because speech in those cases was not expressive.

After it has been shown that the first amendment applies, it then has to be shown that the regulation "violates the applicable level of First Amendment scrutiny"—as in Turner, where they decided that it did involve the first amendment, but nevertheless, the government prevailed. Here, they assert an interest in fostering a free and open marketplace of ideas, as well as preventing discrimination against people who live in Texas, which Alito considers compelling interests.

Netchoice failed to meet this burden. First, it did not establish which entities were affected, which make it difficult to know whether a facial challenge should succeed (might it cover websites like WhatsApp that act more like passive receptacles, without curation, and so be legal at least in those cases?). Second, it did not say what kind of content appears, which might be relevant for the first amendment (e.g. is it political? That might matter). Third, it does not show how they moderate. Reddit outsources moderation, which makes it arguably not reddit's speech.

The majority spends much of its opinion specifically talking about how this would apply to the Facebook newsfeed or youtube homepage. Alito points out that this might not even be needed—the fifth circuit can decide on other grounds. He disagrees with their characterization of it as expressive, as they have not revealed how their algorithms were created or work. And they do not consider whether they should be common carriers. And it is not so obvious that what these platforms do in their curation is the same as what editors do—massive scale, post hoc removal, AI algorithms. It also remains to be considered whether "network effects" make any difference. He thinks all of these should be resolved in a future as-applied challenge.

Turning to the disclosure questions (saying why messages were censored), they must, under Zauderer, not unduly burden speech. That's hard to know in a facial challenge, and even in the case of YouTube, it doesn't seem like that huge of a burden. This is especially the case for companies that already have to do all that anyway under an EU law.

Let's analyze this in a different direction, by issue.

Should this be remanded due to the facial nature of the challenge? 9-0.

Was the 5th circuit's analysis of editorial discretion problematic? Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas do not explicitly say; the other 6 are clear that it erred.

For that reason, should the court give further guidance? 5-4 (Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas, Jackson in the minority)

Is the risk of misattribution sometimes the decisive factor as to whether it is protected speech? 5-3, against Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito. (Jackson gives no indication)

Is it ever relevant whether a compiler includes most items and excludes only a few? 6-3, against Gorsuch, Thomas, Alito.

Is an interest in improving or balancing the marketplace of ideas legitimate to compel speech? 6-3, against Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito.

Does Netchoice's failure to establish which entities are covered mean it fails to show the laws are facially invalid? 9-0.

Is it meaningful that Netchoice has not shown how it moderates content? At least 5 agree: Alito's opinion, Jackson's (she specifically highlights it), and Barrett's.

Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito think that the court should at least have addressed the common carrier argument. They also are concerned that there may be further concerns and important differences between editing a newspaper vs. moderating a social media site (size, network effects, algorithmic vs human moderation).

Some additional thoughts:

People, especially on the left, think of Thomas and the court as corrupt. Aside from the extent to which that is bolstered by politically motivated slander, I don't think they realize that Thomas wants to constrain judicial power, seeing its current state as beyond constitutional bounds. Compare to the complaints of Jackson in Trump v. United States, released on the same day, that the court was expanding its own power. And it isn't unique to this case; he's also expressed doubts about certain conventional forms of standing, and a few other sorts of things. I'd imagine Gorsuch concurs with Thomas on a lot of this, though not on everything he said.

All of these opinions depended heavily on precedent. I have no idea what originalist methodology would say here.

I also don't think I got a sufficiently clear view from either party as to what constitutes expression and what does not.

Well, this is quite nice. I would, however, suggest reposting it on one of the latest threads, so I'm not the only one who gets to enjoy it.

…you're probably right. I've posted it. I added a little more to the final thoughts.

No, we didn't. Nice prediction!

By most accounts and metrics, we in modern Western nations live in the wealthiest, safest society ever. We have some of the broadest and strongest social "safety nets" in history, and lower inequality than most large societies of the past. Thus, the downsides to risk-taking are presumably the lowest ever; never has "the price of failure" been so low.

So, why then, do we seem to be some of the most risk-averse people ever? Why do we appear to be more terrified of failure than our ancestors who were one bad harvest away from starvation?

(I wonder about this, because it seems to me to be a factor in our modern allergy to authority, specifically how scared people seem to be at the idea of stepping up and taking charge of something.)

We get used to safety, and there are fewer risks, so what ones there are feel more serious.

Read a similar thread in hackernews or I might be just Mandela effecting myself, anyways.

I think the most convincing (to me) answer was along the lines of "Having less to lose, is precisely that which make the risk reward ratio so high". You make that equation more top heavy and the ratio goes down. One can argue that modernity allows for a more denominator heavy average outcome, but that's up in the air when you factor in probability.

Counterargument: we are much less risk-averse on average than historical peoples, and as a result the people who throw it all up and risk everything are less extraordinary. Back in the day, when the average risk aversion may have been a 2/10, someone who played at a 5/10 or a 7/10 was extraordinary, and there was money on the table to be gained. Now, most people might be at a 5/10, and as a result playing at a 7/10 isn't that noticeable, and even a 9/10 doesn't pick up that much reward.

Historically, the vast majority of people lived in one place and died there, took the jobs in their town, more or less the same ones their parents held, attended the church their parents attended, married a local girl for life and had kids like their parents did. People died within miles of where they were born. Think of Sam Gamgee, early in Fellowship, stopping on their journey upon the realization that one more step would be the furthest from home he'd ever been, two days into their walkabout! Taking risks was completely foreign to historical commoners.

Today it is very common for ordinary people to move cross country, thousands of miles, to places where they know no one. Few people go into their father's profession, few take over the family land or the family business. I'm an extreme outlier in my PMC peer group for living on the street I grew up in without a drug addiction or a failed marriage holding me back. People are constantly changing careers or homes or marriages. Taking up a new career, moving far from family support networks, borrowing multiples of your net worth to start a business or go to college, leaving your current partner to look for a new one, these are all huge risks that no responsible peasant would countenance, which are routine parts of a middle class American life story.

As a result, taking really big risks doesn't deliver as much value. The great explorers and traders and settlers and entrepreneurs of the past became heroes and gods. and kings, because there was money just laying about waiting for someone to pick it up. If you were willing to throw your life up and move, you were instantly extraordinary, one in a million. Today, you're one of a million, just another guy.

Well put. Hadn't thought about it this way but yeah, compared to historical norms modern society is highly risky. No wonder there's so much anxiety abounding.

I believe, one part of it is this: When life is difficult and you have very few safety nets, every decision you make matters. If you start making such decisions that matter as a 15-year old, by age 20 you are quite used to making such decisions. Also, looking around, you will see a self-selected sample, because those who made abysmally bad decisions or simply unlucky decisions are in the poorhouse or dead.

Other part, look at the safety nets. Most often they are implemented as professionalized bureaucracies: by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats, with standardized paperwork. The British copied the idea of civil service from imperial China, which was not a country known for dynamism. Nearly every Westerner is trained in an environment of bureaucracy (school) that both explicitly and also implicitly trains them to function in another bureaucracy later on. One distinctive feature of a bureaucratic organization is that it can administer rewards for conformity and punishments for non-conformity very reliably. It is designed by humans to function so. You interact with them in a standardized way. Other methods of human organization, such as free competition or informal social networks are quite different. Non-human forces of nature are similarly unforgiving as bureaucracies, but (used to be) unpredictable and not designed by humans.

Final part: I agree it seems like people are very risk-averse compared to previous. I myself feel quite risk-averse. Is it an accurate measure of change of rate in risk-taking? Plenty of people decided stay on the same farm, farming it the same way as their parents and grandparents did, generations after generations. Mostly, we don't hear of them.

While we are safer, we also have more to lose. Advances in communication technology also means we are more exposed to stories of people who do lose it all, or simply slip down a level in SES, often generationally. While we may have an objectively higher standard of living in the working class in 2024 than the much of the upper class from 1924 did, very few people have a real internalized sense of this. Its why the cost of college has ballooned out of control while the number of people attending college is higher than ever; people are desperate to make the middle-class somehow hereditary.

Perhaps I’m misinterpreting the type of “risk-averseness” that you’re talking about, but to me, the relationship between the stability of one’s current situation and one’s willingness to take risks is the exact opposite of your assessment. If you’re already in a perilous situation, then you’re so close to rock bottom that the potential upsides of a risky endeavor far outweigh the potential downsides. Vice versa for a comfortable situation.

This is clearest in sports: in football, it’s usually not the team leading by 10 points with 3 minutes left in the 4th that will throw a Hail Mary or kick an onside kick. In hockey, you never see a team in the lead pulling their goalie.

My recollection of what I've read in the past (which is not worth much) is that if a person is in, for example, a significant calorie deficit, it often comes with lethargy and lack of activity, but if it goes on enough to be a serious threat to life, apparently folks basically involuntarily have a need for movement, bursts of activity. They can't help themselves but to get up and move. So the relation is somewhat state-dependent. Maybe just conserve energy during typical lean periods, but if stuff gets really bad, obviously sitting around wasn't getting the job done, and so the risk of using your last ounce of energy is worth the chance that maybe you'll find a last second food source.

Has Biden or the White House made a statement on the hurricane? A major metropolitan area is completely shut down. No power, spotty cell service. I guess the gulf coast having hurricanes is all “part of the plan”, so nobody cares.

Biden did address the hurricane https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2024-07-02/biden-addresses-extreme-weather-as-hurricane-beryl-heads-toward-jamaica

A hurricane that shuts Houston down briefly is enough of a ‘that happens sometimes’ for Greg Abbott to not be personally involved in the disaster response.

The governor is out of the country on business, and the president is asleep at the wheel. Apparently, utility companies just won’t prep for emergencies or stage equipment without executive officers breathing down their neck.

If so many Americans are as politically disillusioned as polling suggests, why haven't we seen that translate into even lower voter turnout? Why haven't we seen more political groups that meet the needs of disillusioned?

Voter turnout is highly variable based on the election in question (looking at presidential only here). At least, the under-45 vote is - older voters are more stable in voting propensity. Compare to for example this where if you scroll down a bit you can see that "double haters" of both political parties has gone from 6 to 28% in 30 years. So at least casually, there doesn't seem to be a super strong relationship.

I'd question the premise. There are some setups where feelings just don't matter all that much. If you hate to do laundry, well, you still (usually) wear the same number of clothes and end up doing a similar amount of laundry, to use a trivial example. My guess is that the "politically disillusioned" moniker is too generalized to be useful. After all, you only need to care about one specific race to vote, local politics doesn't fall into neat national lines, and many people consider voting a duty or privilege or habit and not a luxury indulgence dependent on positive vibes. I'd consider that latter attitude about voting being a luxury to be faulty, or at the very least, atypical for most Americans.

US politics has basically institutionallized the two party system. It's not a single big law but a whole lot of little laws, well some big, that make starting a competitive third party basically impossible. Whenever a third party presidential candidate makes an impact states tighten ballot access.

To counter act this, party primaries are more open than in other countries.

California has been moving to "jungle primaries" where voters get to choose between the top vote getters in the primary so election day isn't just a D blowout.

I think there's a big downside to that system. Factions within caucus aren't clear from the outside, so if you think that representatives aren't doing a statisfactory job it's not clear who you should vote against. Politicians like that aspect of the current system.

To make an impact you need local activism and involvement. If you start up any group realize that people will try to hijack it.

https://status451.com/2017/11/11/radical-book-club-what-righties-can-do/

Or, the simpler solution is just to set up approval voting. No need for a jungle primary.

Furthermore, the influence of local activism is really understated. The simple fact is that a lot of political movements depend on a certain "critical mass" being reached in the grassroots before it can go mainstream. Intuitively, this seems to suggest that US politics is not in fact near a breaking point in terms of people sick of the system, despite what the media might have you think.

Why haven't we seen more political groups that meet the needs of disillusioned?

At least for the US, the primary reason here is Duverger's Law.

As for the former, I don't have any answers, and the only one I've ever seen proposed, I find somewhat implausible — that being that actual turnout has indeed declined, but growth in ballots fraudulently cast in the names of non-voting voters rise to compensate.

Which electric kettle should I buy?

You've not detailed any criteria, so this suggestion assumes you are willing to spend for quality.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DTMZL56/

If you make coffee, get the gooseneck option.

It is insulated, has constant temperature control, C and F, well built, simple. Boils very fast. The best feature of this is kettle imo is that it doesn't make any sounds. No beeps or chirps of any other unnecessary racket when you're trying to boil water. It was remarkably hard to find a kettle that did this.

What difference does a gooseneck kettle have on my French press coffee? It seems like that's only relevant if you make pour over. Any kind of immersion brewing and the gooseneck doesn't seem to matter.

I have a normal thermostat kettle and I love it, so I will second the recommendation on principle, but I still don't understand the gooseneck thing except as a matter of style.

If you're unsure how much you will use it, I'd do the same approach as I take to tools. That is, buy the cheapest Harbor Freight equivalent, and then if you use it enough for its flaws to annoy you, get rid of it and buy a fancy for-life quality one.

Goal and price range? If you're a coffee guy, I would spring the extra money for the nice goosenecks with temperature settings and timers. Waking up and having hot water ready to go is really convenient. The Fellow Stagg kettle is my favorite that I've used.

I got the glass Amazon basics one, incredibly cheap. They only last a few years at my level of use anyway, so you're not stuck with it forever.

One with stainless steel sides, base and lid to minimise plastic leeching. Also one with a temperature display as some teas will be much better when steeped at 70 degree.

Get one with a temperature display. It's useful for tea varieties that need 70 or 80 or whatever degrees C. I can't recommend a specific one unfortunately because my own without display is still working fine, but I tried one with display while on vacation and I'm a convert. Haven't done the research yet to find the best model for my next purchase.

Just boil water in the microwave.

Doesn’t that risk superheating and explosion

It's possible, but you have to put a ton of effort into it, and most kitchenware today is microwave safed by including microscoring to avoid that sort of problem. And if you're not sure, throwing anything like a wooden kitchen utensil (or a toothpick) in will completely eliminate the risk.

That said, tea purists will absolutely dump boiling water on you for doing it, though.

I'm a tea purist with a $200 usd kettle, and I'm fine with using a microwave if that's all that I have around. I probably spent a decade making tea at work this way with zero issues. I even tried intentionally causing a "superheating" situation and couldn't make it happen. Do let the water cool down a bit before making (black) tea; 99c is the ideal temperature. Water that is actually as a rolling boil with ruin the flavor of the tea by boiling out some of the oil in the leaves. You can tell when you've done this by a lot of small bubbles forming on the surface. For green tea let it cool a bit more, 90-95c.

Heathen. Barbarian. Pagan.

At keast they're boiling it, I saw a comment a couple of days ago from someone saying they use the hot tap.

I hope they have an instant hot water dispenser.

I believe that's a cry for help.

There are some Catholics on the Motte, right? What do you do for guidance/ clarification on finer points of doctrine as they relate to everyday moral behavior? I'd imagine the first-line recourse is just "ask your parish priest," but for questions that are a little more theologically complex, or where you've gotten conflicting information already?

If it's a bio-ethical question, reach out to the National Catholic Bioethics Center.

Otherwise, read books on the topic, get a Spiritual Director, something in between. One time I booked an appointment with my parish priest and all he said amounted to, "Yeah, that sounds like a difficult situation."

Just as an aside, it constantly surprises me how little practical purity there is on doctrine from Catholics, which is odd considering that theoretically and historically shouldn't Catholicism be like, the most purist? Like, there's been a thousand and a halfish years to work this stuff out, and tradition is sort of co-equal with scripture (to my understanding), so you'd think that would imply doctrinal convergence. Or maybe it's more of an implementation problem? Or is it the nature of modern life to actually surface unique moral questions with no clear analogue?

Tradition is held to be equal with Scripture, yes - but there's a lot of stuff which isn't dogma handed down by tradition, so there's room for a lot of disagreement on things still. And of course, it can be challenging to figure out how the principles of the faith (whether given by Tradition or Scripture) apply to specific circumstances.

The answers vary, unsurprisingly. I prefer to trust the judgement of a parish priest/pastor, but moral guidance is pretty widely available on the internet for Catholics to address stock quandaries, ranging from individual priests putting homilies on the internet to seminary moral theology textbooks.

I've joined a weekly prayer group (a diocesan sponsored group from a international organization) we have a chaplain who joins us but hearing from others is often just as informative. I've never had a good personal relationship with parish priests or residence hall rectors (were priests at the University I attended), but with the weekly group makes approaching and conversing with the chaplain very easy. Other alternatives are spiritual direction, I would advise against broaching theologically complex questions in the sacrament of confession.

What makes this specific to Catholics? Are you Catholic with some sort of question you're unsure about? But then you would probably just ask that.

I'm Protestant, and for me, the answer is either to try and go find if there's anything helpful in old theological writings (of which there are many, not all of which are in English), or, just ask the pastor or other individuals I generally trust to have good insights.

I'm just going to note that for actually existing Catholicism and Catholics, the answer is mostly the same stuff anyone else would do: ask people you trust, read philosophers' books or essays on the topic. With whatever additional weight given to Catholic priests and theologians makes you comfortable.

I realize that endeavouring to be more Catholic than the Pope is a less obvious joke than it once was, but nonetheless: don't make the philosophically and theologically perfect the enemy of the good.

It's great if you have a friendly priest, but IME a lot of them are overworked, tired, apathetic, uneducated, and/or unorthodox. In those cases, a good Catholic friend is probably your next best bet. The Catechism is good, but since it's just a book, it won't give you an answer tailored to your specific circumstances that takes into account mitigating/aggravating factors, your intent, your history, etc etc.

I used to be more scrupulous about small infractions and I would get stuck wondering whether or not doing something was strictly allowed, but these days I just try to recall what I've studied and apply the general principles to my situation to the best of my ability in the moment. It's always good to reflect at the end of the day to check where you succeed and where you failed ("examination of conscience") and then do further reading if needed. It helps calibrate your sense of right and wrong without you overthinking in the moment and falling into analysis paralysis.

I'd imagine the first-line recourse is just "ask your parish priest,"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catechism_of_the_Catholic_Church and similar published materials also often work fine

People of the motte who don't live in your birth country any more - what is that like? I've been curious about the experience of those who make such a significant life change, since it seems like it would be a massive undertaking to uproot oneself in that way. What prompted the move? What have been the biggest challenges? What have been the greatest rewards? Anything which was surprising to you, that you never would have thought to even consider before making the move?

what is that like?

It's a mixed bag, overall I slightly prefer my home country (the US).

What prompted the move?

My wife is native to this country and we wanted to raise our kids bilingual/bicultural.

What have been the biggest challenges?

It's crazy expensive to pay for an overseas family move without moving assistance from the military, your company, etc. I worked a contract job on top of my full time job for about a year to save up enough (my wife is a SAHM).
It's also pretty lonely sometimes. Living abroad is fun when you're young and single and have lots of free time, but as a married family man, it's mostly the same as living back home except I have to deal with laws and social customs that are hard for me to understand. And because I'm no longer a baby faced bright eyed 22 year old but a 30-something year old head of a household it's no longer "cute" when I get confused or make a mistake, so I get cut less slack.

What have been the greatest rewards?

Seeing my kids participate in culture events, festivals, learn traditional songs, become fluent with their own way of speaking in the local language, and more. I think we've done a good job getting them educated and well integrated into this society. Personally I feel like it has scratched my wife and my "I want to live overseas" itch so I can return to the US and not be tormented by what could have been. I've also developed a hobby of making a local alcoholic drinks and pickled vegetables. And gardening, although I guess I could've done that anywhere.

Anything which was surprising to you, that you never would have thought to even consider before making the move?

Many small things, but one major one that stands out is how accepting people have been of me and my half-foreign family despite this country famously being "closed" socially (and having been "closed" historically in a much more literal sense). Local people don't treat me like a tourist because tourists almost never come out here, so I think they assume that I belong here even if they don't know me. It also helps that I have kids in the local school system.

Thanks! I'm guessing from the talk about closure that you are living in Japan?

Yep, living in rural Japan.

I think it depends mostly on where you move. Britain (especially London) is a very easy place to move to from the US, same language, many cultural similarities, huge numbers of Americans in London. I already knew people here before I arrived, which was nice and helped with making friends.

The biggest challenge is loneliness at the start, for sure. Rewards? It’s nice to have a sense of distance. If bad stuff happens, it’s not ‘your’ country, you can detach, if it is your country you feel more anguish. What surprised me? People quite like Americans here, I had expected a pretty cold reception but arrived at the end of the Obama years (which Trump hasn’t much affected) following the Bush-era nadir of the reputation of Americans in Western Europe.

Other stuff I’ve noticed? More attractive men, on average (and less attractive women, particularly outside London). People take life less seriously here, are less ‘sweaty’, which I like. You realize that the ultra-ambitious grindset hustle mindset stuff is common only in the US, elsewhere in the West it’s weird and considered cringe. People work hard, but they don’t think it’s because they’re tough, they just think it’s their job. The US is richer as a result, but at what cost?

Biggest gain?

Like triple the vacation time. I have almost 30 days + public holidays, everyone takes all of it, everyone goes away for 2+ weeks in the summer. If it’s a nice day and work’s not too intense people leave at 4 and get a drink in the sunshine at the pub. I would find it tough to return to NYC working culture now, having to plan cover for vacations 6 months in advance and explain to my boss why I needed 8 days at once lmao.

Thanks! It's kind of interesting that men are more attractive while women are less attractive. I guess I would've guessed that both would go up or down together, but apparently I would have guessed wrong.

Thanks! It's kind of interesting that men are more attractive while women are less attractive.

Speaking as a straight guy, I don't agree that women in the US are more attractive than in the UK. I think straight people (which I assume 2rafa is) often have a slightly distorted view of what the opposite sex actually finds attractive, which is why e.g the female-dominated fashion industry keeps hiring super-thin models, and why so many men try and get as muscular as possible.

The fashion industry doesn’t actually care whether men find their models attractive. Men aren’t making the buying decision.

I think, knowing a few seamstresses, that the real reason for ultra-thin models is that they’re easy to tailor for.

That's fair, but I don't think it changes my argument that most women still probably over-estimate how thin the body types that men find most attractive are. What's probably more accurate to say when it comes to the appearance of fashion models is that they're one of the causes rather than an effect of these distorted perceptions.

Apparently the French right-wing party did way worse than expected?

Anyone know why the polling was so far off?

I'm not sure the polling was wrong, rather than the situation changed, often dramatically. A significant portion of the running politicians dropped out, with instructions for their voters to support other candidates, sometimes candidates that normally would not be obvious second choices.

A pretty remarkable trust exercise and/or intense negotiation, if we're being honest. I can't imagine coordinating so many down-ballot dropouts, not to mention making the call about individual personalities and leaning on them to drop out as well (presumably most everyone who ran, wanted the job).

Not the first time this has happened. People working within these types of political systems are generally better at this kind of coalition-building. This whole left coalition was assembled in two weeks after the election announcement. Meanwhile Americans are fretting about whether or not four months is enough time to switch candidates.

Say it in hushed tones but I think the European far right has a ceiling of 30-35% because the rest of society will make any compromises necessary to keep them out of any real power (we saw what happened the last time). In the end they'll be loud and a thorn in everyone's sides but utterly and completely insignificant in therms of how much power they wield. I think Macron was completely correct to call out the voter's bluff and slap down Le Pen by proxy.

People noticed how the UK's election saw our far right Reform party get less than 1% of the seats on around 15% of the vote and they talk about how FPTP stops extremists but a part of me feels that because of FPTP the UK is one of the few places where the far right could ever end up welding significant power because unlike Europe where 35% gets you 35% of the seats and no power here 35% (or less) can give you a large majority to enact whatever laws you want.

Or maybe it could be that no single party enjoys more than say 35% support in pretty much any European country?

As for the "far right" they're in the government of multiple European nations or direct supporters of the sitting government in multiple nations right now.

The issue isn't that they can't get in power but that accomplishing their goals is very hard due to how broad reforms they need to accomplish them, with important parts often tied up in international agreements/conventions.

My assumption is that it's hard to estimate how willing and disciplined people are to turn out not to vote for their own party but against a party they dislike. Turnout for the second round remained very high, so RN lost because they're very unpopular among their non-supporters.

Deliberate errors in counting

More effort and evidence than this, please.

Unlikely given that French ballots are counted by hand at commune level in full view of the candidates' representatives.

Why you think that polls would deliberately overestimate it?

Do you have any evidence for vote fraud?

What has your experience been with SSC/ACX or SSC-adjacent communities in your area? What are your thoughts on the future of the scene at large, online and offline?

Went to a local informal ACX meetup recently and was pleasantly surprised by the group. The members were all interesting in their own way: most had niche intellectual interests they could discuss at length (including ones they had written about on their substacks or elsewhere online), some had studied at elite universities, others had met many in the greater Lesswrong-Bay Area rationalist scene. At 25 I was one of the younger members, but not the youngest, and everyone was <31 (in this meetup at least). This got me wondering about the state of the rat/rat-adjacent community (side note: is there any sort of official name for this space? I think most of us are familiar with the scene I'm describing here but I'm not sure what to label it) at large. Do meetups happen regularly in your area? What's the turnout like, and are you regularly seeing newer/younger members joining? Has anything interesting come of them: like a business/organization started or the groups achieving any sort of collective goals?

I've always found it interesting how this space manages to naturally attract smart, open-minded, and intellectually curious people. And it does so because (I think) reading LessWrong/SSC selects for these qualities in a way that an open forum that sells itself on fostering them probably wouldn't, such a place would probably just revert to the median subreddit-level discourse. I've seen comments suggesting it's on the decline. For example: that this site's weekly threads get less activity than the subreddit's did at its peak. I guess this site in particular will struggle in the long-term to find new posters to replace the ones that leave or just post less frequently without Reddit to promote it. At the same time, I wouldn't, for the reasons I described, want to just advertise it to the masses. But the SSC subreddit doesn't seem as active as it once was either.

Related question: are there any new/younger writers in the space? Scott recommends Ricki Heicklen who graduated from undergrad in 2019 but she hasn't posted in a while.

I'm the organizer for my city's LW/SSC/Rationality (capital R) meetup. We have a similar demographic to the one you experienced, minus the "many in the greater..." part. Most of our group is 30 or younger, with a few 40+ people sprinkled in. Engagement varies in a pattern I've yet to study or understand: some socials get 10+ people out, others three; some purposeful meetups (i.e., we're discussing topic X) get eight, others a mere two. (I suspect it's a combination of unlucky schedule misalignments, the topic only appealing to a handful of people, and it often being a hastily-designed event due to my personal time/energy constraints.)

Nothing major has come out of the group at a collective level. I hold an annual goals meetup on the first week of January designed to help members network with each other to find similar people and potential accountability partners, but it ends up with people stating their goals and never following up on them until the next year when they've been forgotten. Some members hang out with each other outside of the group. I've started accountability partnerships with a few. I do think there's opportunity given the average member's intelligence and ambition.

I think regularly attending is largely worthwhile solely because of the people you meet there. I don't have many IRL friends interested in the topics we discuss, so the meetups are a good outlet to talk about things in person, especially with people smarter than me! Consider attending more and trying to grow the group without sacrificing the member quality.

Regarding new/younger writers in the space: I don't know of anyone besides myself (and I wouldn't even count myself considering how small of a following I have). I graduated from undergrad in 2020 and regularly post on my website/publish monthly changes to Substack. Happy to DM you if you're interested in the link. (I don't want to post it here because it feels like improper advertising.)

I wouldn't mind you advertising, for one. Feel free to take this comment as a reason to; now it's not unprompted.

I've liked the groups I attended. Intelligent, friendly, and surprisingly not that socially awkward.

What purchases have you been extremely satisfied with lately? Can be large, small, regular or extraordinary, for yourself or as a gift, whatever.

For me:

-- I love my 97lb kettlebell. I'm having so much fun.

-- I bought a NEBO cap light at the hardware store, although upon googling to find it for this I'm realizing I overpaid. It's really convenient, in the heat lately I've been trying to walk my dog for a long walk before the sun comes up and again after it comes down, I bought it to keep the red light on when I walk her to avoid getting hit by a car. I've never had a good clip light before, it's so far superior to a strap on headlamp.

-- I like cool mint Zyns on long drives. I don't use them daily, but I find them very nice when I'm tired and bored, the nicotine perks me up, and the flavor is sort of nice with a diet coke without eating anything.

-- Lately I've been living off of frozen fruit blended with cottage cheese in the vitamix. It hits my frozen treat desire in the summer while being fairly high protein.

What about you?

Huh, I've never tried doing real cardio with zyn. Does it raise your heart rate a lot? Do you use the 6mgs?

I bought a 22 lb weighted vest/plate carrier. Really great for running and rucking, and most fun of all: it adds a layer of immersion to the mil-sim shooter I play on the Quest and turns my gaming sessions into nice workouts.

At least you'll already be running when people yell "are those level IV plates?"

Lots of weird looks but it hasn't happened yet!

Not me, but a friend bought an Insinkerator instant hot water dispenser. It actually makes their kitchen more functional and luxurious, unlike traditional "luxuries" like stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. You can start steeping tea immediately, make instant oatmeal instantly, and cut a decent fraction of the cooking time for pasta.

I'm a musician in my spare time, but I live in a tiny apartment with my girlfriend - no room for my guitars or even a practice amp. I was browsing a guitar shop in Adelaide in February and I spotted one of these Traveler guitars - extremely compact guitars designed for people on the road. I bought this one. This guitar is tiny: 71cm long, 13cm wide (a typical full-size guitar is 101cm x 38cm) and weighs only a little over a kilo. But its scale length is very slightly longer than my preferred guitar when I'm in the studio, so it's not like I'm cramping my fingers playing a half-size guitar. One of the ways they achieved such a small length is by integrating the machine heads into the body of the guitar, so there's no headstock. The tone from the guitar is very respectable, considering how small the body is. I can plug the guitar into my recording interface connected to my laptop, lay down a quick demo, then stash the guitar under my couch when I'm not using it. It even comes with a removable laprest so you can play it sitting down. Best of all, it set me back less than €400, and I got it on finance.

Nylon pot scraper on Amazon. My life is changed. I absolutely hate the Brillo pads and similar products wear out quite quickly. The scraper on the other hand never scratches but is just the right hardness to get rid of a surprising amount of gunk from pans without getting caught in a brush or sponge that would need periodic cleaning. Seriously, incredible purchase. You wouldn't think big deal but, big deal.

Also, and I'm fully aware this is like the stupidest looking thing of all time, this cell phone holder. The metal bit is actually really really bendable, so you can use it as a stand like the tripod things for Zoom calls, etc. but with way more flexibility of where to put it and height as well (works for on top of a desk without a weird too-low angle). You can fold it back on itself and put it on your stomach (better than neck) to watch a video laying down in bed (the holder rotates for easy wide-video too). Sometimes I find myself needing or wanting to film something that requires two hands, so then (and only then) I'll do the neck thing. I have used it while cooking as a stand too, or in a pinch it can also be shaped around an arm rest or chair back (used for a family photo once). It's big and solid, which is actually a plus.

Both of these items I have had at least two friends purchase based on my recommendation and both really like them.

Quick coupling hose connector. They're not that expensive and I don't have that many faucets or hoses.

What the heck do you do with a kettleball? I've heard so much about them being fun or people using them a lot. What makes them fun? Do they replace going to the gym for you?

For the most part, what you do with a kettlebell is repetitive explosives. You can also do more static exercises with them, like squats and presses and rows, and that's fine, but not really any better than a barbell or a dumbbell for that. In my mind the snatch is the king of all kettlebell exercises, the swing is the starting point (I've done the 10k swings in 30 days thing a couple times), but the ultimate expression of the kettlebell as an exercise tool is the 5-10 minute snatch test. The rounded motion, bringing it between your legs for the swing snapping the hips and pulling it through then swinging back down, provides a much more natural motion than the stiffness of a barbell or a dumbbell for reps. I can do 50 reps of KB snatch much easier than 50 reps of barbell snatch, much more graceful and with less chance of injury.

Sometimes I'm a kettlebell focused guy, sometimes I'm a barbell focused guy, sometimes I'm really into rock climbing. I'm mid at any of them. For me it's just one more thing I do when I'm in the mood for it, but in all honesty I think with one 24kg kettlebell you could get into better shape than most people do with a full gym. I'm just not that kind of minimalist.

Do you ever live your 97lb kettle bell over your head and scream "You have failed me for the last time!"?

No, but I did name it Erica, after a girl I dated who weighed 97lbs.

This has long been a tradition with warmup weights on the barbell for me, each weight between a pair of 25s and a pair of 45s+5s is a former lover. But this is the first kettlebell I've ever had that is person sized.

I got a star projector that puts pretty colours on my ceiling, it makes a much more aesthetic room imo.

I (by which I mean my wife) got one like that for my niece, it plays lullabys and projects stars on the ceiling. Her and her little brother have both gone through phases of refusing to go to bed without it. It was really a neat item.

Canon EOS-R5. Excellent camera body.

Bought a $10 Hario cold brew pitcher for my fridge. It's easy to use and the coffee is pretty good. I used to dick around with a $40 Filtron and its gnarly cloth(?) drip filters, but maintenance was a PITA. This is so much easier and ~90% as delicious.

I always just make cold brew in a half gallon mason jar, but for $10 that isn't bad.

Whenever I make cold brew, I don't get why other forms of coffee exist. It's so easy, requires no expensive equipment, comes out perfect every time.

In reluctant defence of Amazon, I bought a cheap HDMI to VGA adapter/converter from one of those brands with a weird Chinglish brand name and it worked flawlessly with no noticeable latency. Very satisfied with that one.

I've also been expanding my tool collection with cheap tools from Lidl, which while not the best are far better than I had assumed such cheap tools from a discount supermarket would be and more than adequate for the light duty use a casual DIYer like me subjects them to. Really handy for filling out the gaps in my kit without spending top dollar for something I don't have many uses for but struggle to do without. It's the only shopping experience I can find these days where I feel like I'm leaving good deals behind instead of trudging around six different shops or a dozen different websites that fail to offer a single appealing purchase between them.

I bought an apron. I was tired of getting grease stains on my clothes from cooking. I tried buying a couple on Amazon but both the expensive and cheap ones were low quality. Finally I went to a local catering supply shop which had a huge selection to choose from, all at reasonable prices.

The enshitification of Amazon continues.

I cobbled together a home gym from various suppliers (Half rack, FID Bench, Barbell, 100kg of weight plates) for a really reasonable price. Goodbye gym fees.

Home gym master race. It's so far superior.

I do go back to my old climbing gym weight room about twice a year to try to hit a max on the jerk or snatch, because I don't have a proper safe drop space or enough bumper plates at home.

Do you work remotely? I'm full remote, and I've thought about making a home gym, but then the gym is one of my few excuses to leave the house, so I'm worried I'll end up with cabin fever.

I'm kind of the opposite, my job involves a ton of driving around and meetings on an unpredictable schedule, so the home gym helps me keep on schedule because it's A) always open and B) zero commute time.

I also don't like showering at the gym, so there's that.

Olympus E-M5 mk3 camera and a couple of pro series lenses (12-45 f4 & 40-150 f4) for it. They’re a great combo of high quality and small weight. Life is too short to lug subpar or too heavy gear with you. They do say the best camera is the one you have with you, afterall.

The downside is that photographers are some of the most disagreeable people on the planet and there’s particularly a vocal subset of Micro Four Thirds users who like to gaslight everyone and eg. claim that the combo I have or the newer model don’t exist.

Seafoam fuel additive. I have always thought everything like this was bullshit...I was wrong. Seafoam will fix engines. I've recently used it on two lawnmowers, one riding tractor, and a generator that I would have otherwise had to take apart, one of the lawnmowers I did take apart and clean the carb etc...the seafoam pushed it over the edge afterwards into a useful machine. It is now on my list of mechanical must haves.

Adding wide, convex rear-view mirrors (both interior and exterior) to your car makes changing lanes on the highway absolutely stress-free. This image is only slightly exaggerated: with a wide, convex interior rear-view mirror, you can watch through the rear window and through the right rear passenger window simultaneously (especially after removing the headrest from the front passenger seat).

Why is this not standard on every car? It seems so obviously superior.

Under the relevant section of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (a set of regulations issued by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration), only the passenger-side rear-view mirror is permitted to be convex. (That's the reason for the "objects in mirror are closer than they appear" warning.) The interior and driver-side mirrors, on the other hand, are specifically required to be flat ("of unit magnification").

Some cursory searches (1 2) of the Federal Register do not reveal any discussion of the rationale behind this particular rule. However, one other discussion appears to be related. On vehicles that are heavier than five tons, the passenger-side rear-view mirror cannot be convex, but is required to be flat like the other two mirrors. Way back in year 2000, AM General, the manufacturer of the Hummer H1 (with gross weight of 5.15–6.05 tons), requested that this rule be changed to match the rule for passenger vehicles. With typical government alacrity, NHTSA took five years to reject the request:

Despite public commenters' expressions of support for a convex-mirror option for the vehicles in question, the agency remains concerned about the difficulties that drivers may encounter in correctly judging distance and speed of approaching traffic if the vehicle is only equipped with a convex mirror. As stated in the Request for Comments, although convex mirrors are permitted on the passenger side of light vehicles, the agency still receives complaints from consumers about these mirrors. "There have been other problems associated with the use of convex mirrors that include double vision, eyestrain, and nausea."

Thanks for the effortful reply.

Seems like it's a hodgepodge of regulatory fuckery and legitimate but probably outlier issues with vision, distance judging, etc.

I await the day where full self-driving car manufacturers have to confront regulatory bureaucrats who ask questions like, "Can the AI use flat mirrors during lane changes, or would it prefer convex ones?"

especially after removing the headrest from the front passenger seat

Surely the passenger would object?

In approximately 98 percent of my trips, there is no passenger. I keep the front passenger seat's headrest in the rear seats' footwell, so that, in the rare event that I do have a passenger, the headrest can be reinstalled in just a few seconds of toolless effort. Your situation, and your vehicle, may be different.

As an alternative to removing the headrest, you can just fold the seat back so that the headrest doesn't block your view.

Huh. That's pretty neat.

So, what are you reading?

I’m on Hülsmann’s Abundance, Generosity and the State, an attempt to understand gifts in the framework of Austrian economics. It was apparently inspired by Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate.

I just started into Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. So far, so good. We had to learn about his OODA loop at The Naval Academy, and I knew he was responsible for other parts of air combat strategy, so it's nice to get more details.

Boyd was born in 1927. The descriptions of his early life during the Great Depression made me happy to be alive now, and the descriptions of his positive male role models who emphasized accomplishment, integrity, and hard work made me long for days gone by.

About halfway through The City and the City by China Miéville. As I mentioned last week the comparisons to Kafka seem well-earned. Also reminds me of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy a smidge.

I got about 30% into Iron Gold and dropped it. I quickly caught on to some of Pierce Brown's writing quirks, many of which are bad, and couldn't continue.

Now, I'm starting Christopher Roucchio's Empire of Silence, the first book in The Sun Eater series. I read the first book is the weakest and the rest of the series improves with each book.

I'm sorry to hear that, but I understand. Brown is not the best writer in the world.

I wish I could tell you it's all worth it, and I almost believe that myself. Dark Age is better, and Lightbringer was also quite enjoyable, but they're not going to be much different in style than Dark Age.

At the risk of ruining the books for myself in the future, what writing quirks did you notice?

Reading two books simultaneously, Woke Up This Morning, which is the oral history (in book form) of The Sopranos. My fanaticism for The Sopranos borders on obsession; there is nothing (except The Wire) that comes close to its level of writing and it remains the benchmark by which I judge all shows. Watching House of the Dragon after having just rewatched The Sopranos is a joke. HOTD is nowhere near the same level of quality.

I’m also reading Ordinary People. Just a few chapters in and it’s nice and depressing. So far so good.

Mad Men is outstanding though I admit it falls short of Sopranos and the GOAT of all GOATS, The Wire.

A lot of the writers / producers / show runner people from Sopranos were on Mad Men as well which makes sense.

For whatever reason, I could not get into Mad Men. I tried twice, got through Season 3 on both attempts, and I just...lost interest.

I felt similar about Deadwood which many people have said to be in the same quality ballpark as The Sopranos. For Deadwood I watched seasons 1 and 2, and while I thought it was good, it also wasn't compelling enough for me to continue.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are both outstanding, but don't have nearly the rewatchability of The Sopranos and The Wire. True Detective season 1 is also a considerable force, and I would rank it alongside with any individual season of The Sopranos.

Switching gears, have you read either of David Simon's books? Both Homicide and The Corner are two of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. I highly recommend both of them (in that order).

Mad Men hits its stride in Seasons 3 and 4. I implore you, try again.

Agree about David Simon's books. George Pelecanos (who has a bunch of writing credits from The Wire) has a whole D.C. quartet which really feel like The Wire set 1 hour south on I-95. Supreme Tier beach books.

David Simon is an interesting person to me in how he, unfortunately, followed the bad path of the mainstream / Hollywood adjacent Liberal. The Wire is amazing in large part because there are no clean answers. With maybe one or two exceptions, every character and every institution (the police, the schools, the labor unions, hell, the criminals) are shown to be complex systems wherein individual interest, political pressure, and system wide breakdowns conspire to make The Right Thing hard to do. I always loved that Simon's writing and direction did this when it's a lot easier for show runners to pick easy "good guy vs bad guy" narratives.

But, if you watch We Own This City, which is a "spiritual successor" to The Wire, it seems to have pretty clear cashed in for "Cops-R-Bad" tropes. Paired with some of Simon's personal comments on a variety of issues, you can tell where he lines up today.

Sad, but, all in the game though, right?

Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street. It's pretty good. Earnestly informative and funny too. I think someone here recommended it. :)

Peter Lynch is the GOAT. I found One Up to be the best book on investing I’ve ever read.

It's a bit old though. Have you found anything more recent, of similar quality?

I have, for the most part, given up on individual stock picking and activist investing. When I was younger, I read such things as The Intelligent Investor, A Random Walk Down Wallstreet, Get Rich Carefully, among others, but I’ve since become a FIRE follower and Boglehead. I have a small portfolio of individually picked stocks, but 90% of my net worth is tied up in index funds, mostly S&P 500 and target retirement funds. I still dabble with stock picking (and even options trading during the COVID insanity) but for the most part I just do boring, automated ETF purchases.

I won’t get rich fast, but ideally I will get rich eventually. I also don’t have to worry about picking stocks, beating the market, or questioning where I should invest my money. I simply transfer it to Vanguard and call it good.

ThisIsTheWay.jpeg

Can you pick individual stocks and beat the market? Yes. What is required? Something close to a full time job of research and modeling to do it. If you're comfortable making investing your full time job, go for it! Most people are not because it is heinously boring.

You exaggerate. It does not require several hours each day, from what I've learned. You should do a couple hours of research into a company and learn a little about its industry before you make the first purchase. And you should know what category of company it is. A cyclical would have to be watched more closely, but no one is forcing you to buy cyclicals. After the buy-in you don't need to watch it like a hawk or do "modeling". The same principle of patience applies to individual stocks as it does to index funds. Just leave it for several years while ignoring short term swings. If it's a great company like Berkshire Hathaway, or Microsoft or Apple, you can leave it for a decade or two. Follow the news about the companies/industries from time to time, and read the quarterly and annual reports of the companies you own. But that does not take huge amounts of time, and it's not like you'll be owning 20 companies if you know what you are doing. A handful is enough to mitigate risk.

This reads a lot like "It isn't that hard to win the Super Bowl if you're really good at football."

How do I get good at football?

How do I become good enough to do this low time consumption research and investing? 10Ks and 10Qs are dozens to over a hundred pages of dense language, how do I know what to pick out of them so I don't have to scrutinize every word? How do I know when I know enough about an industry? How do even define "risk" so that I can "mitigate" it (the use of the word "mitigate" really makes me suspicious. Risk cannot be "mitigated" in the sense that it can be fundamentally reduced. Risk can only be transferred. Whatever else you might think of him, this was the highly accurate central point of N.N. Taleb's Black Swan series).

More systemically, are you really going to say that with a few hours here and there of cursory research, one can assemble a portfolio that truly generates long term alpha? It's easy to delude yourself into thinking you're a genius for riding beta and then, when a drawdown happens, to pat yourself on the back for "being patient" and maybe even "buying the dip." But let's not peek at the Sharpe ratio and discover our portfolio is actually just a volatility monster over exposed to a few factors that would be laughed out of any actively managed fund's investment committee.

I'm still on And the Band Played On. It is such an engaging, well written book, that among other things it is making me think of how much I hate writers who make everything depressing and grimdark all the god damn time. Shilts wrote ATBPO, about AIDS, while dying of AIDS, after most of his friends died of AIDS, and it is filled with humor, irony, wry observations and satires. It's hardly ligthhearted, but it maintains a lighthearted degree of readability.

I saw a poster yesterday which read "Demedicalise intersex people".

This is a policy demand I simply don't understand. I don't mean I understand what it means, but I think it's unworkable or impractical or self-defeating: I mean I literally do not understand what is being requested. Could anyone enlighten me?

There are a few things I've seen under this slogan:

The Body Integrity and Self-Determination argument is more what you'll see as an outsider.

There are a wide variety of genetic or other medical conditions that, originally falling under a variety of now-disfavored terms like hermaphroditism and now moved to a spectrum of specific diagnosis and weird acronyms like DSD (Differences of Sex Development). Right now, the standard of care in almost all cases (by definition of them being recognized as medical conditions) involves medical intervention toward a more 'normal' presentation: this can be as minor as hormonal supplementation and/or talk therapy, or involve long sequences of pretty invasive surgery. Some of this has medical justification, but a lot of it's operating more under a theory of ability to operate within society.

The motte is where a child is born with ambiguous genitals. Either genetic, congenital hormone exposure, or other causes give something that wouldn't show up in your Human Physiology 101. It's hard to get exact numbers, since this isn't some strict definition sort of thing, but somewhere between 1-in-200 and 1-in-5000 looks plausible. There's actually a really morbid overlap here with the social conservative fear of doctors forcibly transing kids that you absolutely will not see formally spelled out: a lot of the surgical interventions focus on very young children that clearly can't consent, there's a lot of pressure at parents talking up how refusing early intervention doom the kid's chances of romantic or sexual success as an adult, some unknown number of interventions happened without good (or even knowing) consent from the parents, the medical science itself is really lackluster, and there's even a really lackluster underlying set of medical evidence coming from a sketchy-ass doctor. These early interventions were favored because recovery is much harder at later ages, but it's far from clear that the entire class a) actually succeeds or even has a theoretical underpinning for success (eg, the surgical intervention for clitoromegaly is about what you'd expect from the name, and often has to be explicitly excepted from female-genital-mutilation bans), or b) is necessary as compared to better normalization of this variation.

But there's a wide variety of other conditions that only express during puberty (although they can be increasingly detected earlier with genetic testing) or young adulthood. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is the most common, and often what lies behind of 1-in-100 or 1-in-50 estimates for prevalence of intersexuality, followed by sex chromosome atypicalities (such as XXY or X sex chromosomes), and then varieties of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). These have a variety of more or less subtle results, but hormonal intervention is common and surgical intervention (eg, removal of male breasts) is not unusual. Most of these patients can meaningfully consent by traditional definitions (eg, they're at least old enough to talk), but there's a wide variety of interventions that range from 'you will 100% die if you don't do this' (treatments for salf-wasting CAH), 'this can have major negative ramifications for your long-term functioning', and purely aesthetic stuff, and for medical regulatory reasons they're all sold pretty similarly.

((Some jurisdictions also require certain surgical intervention to change registered sex, which can be... messy.))

The argument is that : some of this stuff isn't broken and doesn't need to be fixed. While individual concerns may require a medical framework, treating mere presentation as intersex under a medical framework encourages or mandates interventions that some portion of the targets would not accept otherwise, both through direct pressure and by making any refusers so weird that they must struggle to work within society.

The more internal debate variant is What Is Intersex to even start with.

There's a list of people who are, were, or could have been subject to the various medical interventions listed above. It's (mostly) uncontroversial to call them intersex. That's not too tricky. What about the rest?

There's a wide variety of conditions that are related in a lot of ways, and only really get chased down or result in interventions if someone involved tries really hard. There's a lot of partial CAH or AIS that just shows up as being kinda awkward, or infertile. Do they have to chase them down to count as intersex, even if they have the same underlying physical thing going on?

Does someone stop being intersex if they were born in an environment that didn't care? That happens, both historically (medical interventions for most intersex conditions basically didn't exist pre-1950) and even today (allegedly guevedoces are pretty accepted, though I don't trust a lot of the literature on them). Does the intersex community no longer exist if they achieve their political goals? Do they disappear over a generation?

What about people who are what I've called whiptail- or hyena-nonbinary, who were 'born that way' at most in the sense that they've had an interest in the matter, and sometimes had to put pretty serious effort into becoming that way?

For this question, 'medicalization' is used in the sense of requiring an explicit diagnosis, and often an early or serious one. This is... messy, in both a coalition-building way and in a hard what-do-words-mean one. Note that this can be in direct conflict with the other use of the phrase.

It is an empirical fact that the list of entities which are admissible into our disease ontology changes over time.

We used to believe in medical conditions like neurasthenia and hysteria, but now we don’t. When presented with the same physical and psychological symptoms, we might just say that it’s part of normal variation, or we might just attribute it to a bad episode, or we could bring the symptoms under the heading of a different disease category altogether - either way, the old categories have been abandoned.

Merely being able to identify a clear biological antecedent to a trait is not sufficient for that trait to be conceived of as a medical condition. It’s reasonable to think that the Big Five personality traits have a substantial basis in genetics, but no one thinks that being extraverted (within reason) is a disease. Extraversion is not medicalized.

The ask is that “I’m intersex” should provoke the same social response as “I’m extraverted” - an “oh, I see” rather than a “wow that’s crazy, what’s that like?” It should be seen as part of normal human variation, rather than conceived of as a wholly distinct category.

Whether this is feasible or desirable is a separate question. But that’s how I understand the request.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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